Book Image

Network Science with Python and NetworkX Quick Start Guide

By : Edward L. Platt
Book Image

Network Science with Python and NetworkX Quick Start Guide

By: Edward L. Platt

Overview of this book

NetworkX is a leading free and open source package used for network science with the Python programming language. NetworkX can track properties of individuals and relationships, find communities, analyze resilience, detect key network locations, and perform a wide range of important tasks. With the recent release of version 2, NetworkX has been updated to be more powerful and easy to use. If you’re a data scientist, engineer, or computational social scientist, this book will guide you in using the Python programming language to gain insights into real-world networks. Starting with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the core concepts of network science, along with examples that use real-world data and Python code. This book will introduce you to theoretical concepts such as scale-free and small-world networks, centrality measures, and agent-based modeling. You’ll also be able to look for scale-free networks in real data and visualize a network using circular, directed, and shell layouts. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to choose appropriate network representations, use NetworkX to build and characterize networks, and uncover insights while working with real-world systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Closeness centrality

The measure known as closeness centrality is one of the oldest centrality measures used in network science, proposed by the sociologist, Alex Bavelas, in 1950. Closeness is defined as the reciprocal of farness. What is farness? It's the reciprocal of closeness, of course! More helpfully, the farness of a node is the sum of distances between that node and all other nodes. So, a node with high closeness centrality is literally close to other nodes. Nodes with high closeness have, on average, short paths to many other nodes, which can be helpful for disseminating resources quickly.

The following example uses the NetworkX closeness_centrality() function to calculate the closeness centrality values for the suffragette network and display the top 10:

closeness = nx.closeness_centrality(G)
sorted(closeness.items(), key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)[0:10]

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